An Open Source of Water for Peru
An innovative, collaborative, and open method of using the University of Oregon campus to secure safe and reliable water access for communities in San Pablo, Cajamarca, Peru.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Field of Work
other
If Field of Work is “other” please define in 1-2 words below
Safe and reliable water access
Year project started (or projected start date) (yyyy)
2008
YouTube Upload
Project URL (or link to any media coverage)
What is the primary problem your venture is trying to address and how are you addressing it (or planning to address it)?
According to the 2006 UNDP Human Development Report, more than 1 billion people around the world lack access to clean water. Oregon Direct Action is working Green Empowerment and Soluciones Practicas in San Pablo, a province of Peru, where nearly 40% of its roughly 24,000 people get their water from unimproved sources (e.g. rivers, streams, ditches). This, coupled with the lowest electrification rate in the country, magnifies poor health, education, social and gender equality, and economic opportunity. According to the World Bank, 53% of the Peru lives below the poverty line. This extreme poverty also has a detrimental effect on the environment, as people are often forced to the margins of society. Safe and reliable water access is at the core of San Pablo's development.
Name Your Project
An Open Source of Water for Peru
Describe Your Idea
An innovative, collaborative, and open method of using the University of Oregon campus to secure safe and reliable water access for communities in San Pablo, Cajamarca, Peru.
Innovation
Project Description
An innovative, collaborative, and open method of using the University of Oregon campus to secure safe and reliable water access for communities in San Pablo, Cajamarca, Peru.
Unique and different
Innovation is what drives Oregon Direct Action. Our projects emphasize using appropriate technology to address infrastructure needs, building from the wealth of traditional knowledge in a community and the experiences of others, and holistic thinking about how sustainability applies to development. Our student team benefits from the unique experience the projects offer, and receive extensive education in teamwork, project management, and world cultures.
ODA plans to maximize benefit to San Pablo by utilizing the community's social capital. Social capital refers to the sense of community, the trust and compassion between neighbors, and the willingness and ease with which a group of people will work toward a common good. This form of capital is often bountiful in regions that are typically considered poor in traditional forms of capital, like factories, natural resources, and financial institutions. The Grameen Bank, among others, has put this idea to use to make low-risk, low -collateral loans to the poor around the world. We plan to use it to get community help for our project, to disseminate valuable health information in the community, and to ensure the sustainability of our project by having its maintenance be community managed.
Our project is also unique because we provide students with varying ways of helping, other than solely fundraising, to solve the issues of the bottom billion.
Project plan
In the next 6 months, we hope to complete a considerable amount of pre-project implementation legwork. This will include a needs assessment in Suro Antiguo, the first community we're working with, using Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning methodologies and house to house surveying. We also plan to capture different types of media (images, audio, and video) from the region we're working in to bring a broader awareness of the issues back to the university campus. On campus, we'll work on strengthening partnerships and community support. We'll run an awareness campaign that includes lectures, advertising, and films. Our fundraising efforts will be led by grant writing and events on campus, among other things.
Partnerships
As part of its open source philosophy, Oregon Direct Action stresses the importance and value that comes from its community. Being an "open source" organization means three things to us: transparency, interactivity, and replicability. We do our best to make everything we do, and every decision we make, completely visible to our community so that they can both learn from us and hold us accountable. We actively welcome new ideas and solicit contributions to our work, and are constructing the project such that our community can be just as involved as the team. To this end, we are developing working relationships with organizations such as Students for Global Health, MAPLE Microfinance, EWB University of Portland, and plan on intensifying our networking efforts this fall. Whitman Direct Action, our sister organization, is also an important partner.
Through Green Empowerment (GE), which partners with rural communities in the developing world to implement renewable energy and water systems in order to alleviate poverty and improve the environment, we have secured a partnership with Soluciones Practicas, the local government in San Pablo, and village leaders.
Impact
Impact
Providing safe and reliable water access via household taps or central distribution points to communities in San Pablo, Cajamarca, Peru will ideally reduce incidences of gastro-intestinal illness, displace the need for women and children to spend hours fetching water so they can instead focus on education, health & nutrition, and pursue micro-enterprise activities; and restore the local watershed.
Effectiveness
To date, our project has served about a hundred people. The community at the University of Oregon has benefited from the awareness we created thus far, and the people of San Pablo are benefitting from this awareness. The students of Oregon Direct Action, additionally, are learning a tremendous amount from this experience.
How do you engage and impact the community?
To complete our San Pablo water project, we plan on engaging both community in San Pablo and the community at the University of Oregon. A key component of our project design will be Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning (PRAP). PRAP allows the local people to identify the issues in their community through maps, charts, and diagrams they create. Futuremore, any infrastructure built will be done so with local labor and maintained through local skill. We're working with the community to help them identify and solve their issues.
How do you measure this impact?
We can measure the impact of providing safe and reliable water access to communities in San Pablo in many different ways, although it is not an exact science. Looking at how the rate of waterbourne disease trends over time will be one way. We can also track average enrollment and hours spent per day in school and studying. Anecdotal evidence from community members before and after project implementation will be an important method of determining how successful they think the project is.
Obstacles
There are a few foreseeable obstacles to maximizing the impact of our water project. First off, we're concerned about the current state of the economy and what this means to foundation support of projects such as ours. We'll still apply for as many grants as we can, but we're also interested in looking into how water access projects can be a self-sustaining and replicating micro-enterprises. In the long term, community and government dependence on external non-governmental organizations is a issue we're very aware of and critically considering how we can mitigate.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
Financing source
(or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)
Our projects will be financed through a combination of grants, soliciting donations, and local events such as silent auctions, film screenings, and lectures.
Aside from financial sustainability, how do you plan to grow and sustain your project?
Oregon Direct Action will be seeking 501(c)3 status in the next two years in order to continue applying eager, talented, and ambitious students to sustainable community development projects.
Finance details
To date, we haven't yet raised any money. Oregon Direct Action formed in May 2008 and much of the summer was spent building partnerships and developing project concepts. In the next two weeks, we will be adding five or more people to our three person team, and actively seeking the participation of our community. We have five organizational partners in various capacities at the moment.
Creative funding
Oregon Direct Action has not yet raised any funding. We plan to do so in the near future by hosting a benefit concert on campus, hosting a lecture series on the topic of safe and reliable water access, and having a silent auction/hosted dinner. Using The Point, a website where funders pledge their donation and aren't charged until the requested amount is reached, is another idea we're considering.
Other non finance needs
In addition to financial support, the success of our water project in San Pablo will depend on able knowledge resources, partnerships, and community support. We're fortunate to be situated on the University of Oregon campus, lending us tremendous access to professors, professionals, and students interested in sustainable community development. We've begun relationships with organizations on campus and off in order to strengthen our experience capital and outsource tasks as needed. Furthermore, Green Empowerment's partnership with Soluciones Practicas, a well-respected Peruvian organization, is an important part of support from the communities in San Pablo.
The Story
Motivation
When entering freshman year at Whitman College, I was fortunate to go on a backpacking trip with a member of Whitman Direct Action (WDA) and learn all about WDA's Central American Biodiesel Project. The Biodiesel Project was a year long endeavor that culminated in two conferences in Nicaragua and Honduras teaching participants how make biodiesel, the co-founding of two regional biodiesel resource centers, and the authoring of a biodiesel howto manual in Spanish. All throughout high school I had wanted to learn more about biodiesel and promote it as an alternative to petroleum-based fuel. When I learned about the biodiesel project, however, it was nearing completion and WDA had been partially disbanded because of the massive time commitment required for the project.
The following May, WDA embarked on the Sadhana Clean Water Project, a previously funded Youth Venture, and I was fortunate to be a part of the team even though I have since transferred to the University of Oregon. With Oregon Direct Action, and the water project for San Pablo, I hope to offer the same amazing learning experiences to a new set, and type, of student.
Awards
Oregon Direct Action has not yet received any awards or recognition.
Broader context
With the San Pablo water project, our goal is provide opportunities for students at the University of Oregon to learn from, grow with, and participate in what we do. We're empowering students to create better worlds by breaking the issues into discrete projects, and then revealing a clear and concise path towards addressing the issue that anyone can participate in. We're fortunate to live in a world now where all of this can be communicated over the internet via regular blog posts, assigned readings, videos documenting what is happening with the project, and other tools.
Ongoing
I've found an amazing passion for sustainable, environmentally sensitive development in the past couple of years, and see myself leading in this arena not only through organizational work, but also photography and a variety of other means.
What is your age?
21
How did you hear about this competition?
I was a member of the Whitman Direct Action team that received funding from the Youth Venture program last year. I was fortunate to spend three months in India this spring partially on behalf of that grant looking at the socio-political constraints to clean water access.
 | 192 weeks agoZeba Khan said: Hi Daniel, Hope to learn more about your project. Let us know if you have any questions with regard to completing the form. Thanks ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
